From: "Paul Murphy" <Villanova-AT-btopenworld.com>
Subject: Re: standard diatribes
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 13:29:02 +0200
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
I'm sorry, I find most of this banal, I'm a wargamer, in fact I make a living from it, so know a fair amount of military history. You filled a few gaps though. An accessible intro to the Crusades is the aptly titled The Crusades by Terry Gilliam (yes, that Terry Gilliam),
PM
----- Original Message -----
From: Scribe1865-AT-aol.com
To: nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Sent: Sunday, July 21, 2002 3:51 AM
Subject: Re: standard diatribes
In a message dated 7-20-2002 8:52:24 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Villanova-AT-btopenworld.com writes:
yes, but Islamic progress ended some time ago. ie before the Enlightenment.
Why do civilisations decline, fall and rise? At one point Islam was a
world-conquering religion, with fanatical warriors (Ghazis) who fought for
loot. Then the Empire regulated warfare, and the army declined, ie became
less fanatical.
Yes, what is the Golden Age that the Islamist Arabs wanting to return to? What is the Ottoman Empire's grandeur that Bin Laden was trying to restore? To understand how delusionary it is, you have to know the time period. Here are some notes on the subject. -Eric / NYC
_________________
The Ottomans were around for about 600 years before Turkey became a Republic. It was the Ottomans who couldn=E2=80=99t keep up with European technology and military advances. Furthermore they were very much in decline as an empire and so unable to resist the European colonizers. The Turks are not a serious problem for us today. Instead we are concerned with Arab Fundamentalists who want to return to a Golden Age, but when was that Golden Age? And what happened to them during the Ottoman Empire?
It is an oversimplification to say that the Middle East was colonized by the French and English because it was colonizable, but at the same time it should not be forgotten that in the history of the human race, power vacuums are eventually filled by someone. Perhaps that is like saying =E2=80=98the keys were in the car. Someone was going to steal it so why not me?" But that has been realpolitik. Perhaps the current superpower has a more benign way of filling the power vacuums, seeking to get everyone to behave and be a decent trading partner. Our history is not so long that we can be sure.
Mohammad began his career in 622 and died in 632. He started the Arab expansion and it continued under the Caliphs that succeeded him. During the period 633-37, Syria and Iraq were conquered and during the period 639-42 Egypt was.
The Arab Golden age began with Mohammed in 622. He died in 632 and was succeeded by the first Righteous Caliph, Abu Bakr (632-634). The second Righteous Caliph was Omar (634-644). The third was Othman (644-655), and the last was Ali (655-661). After these four Righteous Caliphs, things began to degenerate a bit. Muawiya I (660-80) reverted to the methods used by pre-Islamic patriarchal chiefs, and after him it didn=E2=80=99t get any better. So the Golden Age of Islam referred to so often lasted a mere 39 years.
"The Umayyad period (661-750), which followed the Golden Age, can be generally described as the Mediterranean epoch of the caliphate, the period of the second great expansion of the dar al-islam." [from Grunebaum=E2=80=99s Classical Islam, A History, 600-1258]. In a real sense the Arab ascendancy ended with the fall of the Umayyad=E2=80=99s.
The next period was the Abbasid [the period began with the fall of the Umayyad but ended in stages: Spain in 756, Morocco in 788, Tunisia in 800, and Egypt in 868] and many consider it to be a victory of the Persians over the Arabs but there were Arab elements in the Abbasid. What held the empire together was no longer the Arabs in a leading position but Islam. Bernard Lewis refers to the Umayyad period as "The Arab Kingdom," and the Abbasid as "The Islamic Empire." There was a gradual lessening of Arab influence during the Abbasid period. Lewis in his The Arabs in History writes on page 84, "In the Army, the Arab militia was no longer important and the pensions paid to the Arabs were gradually discontinued except for regular serving soldiers. . . ."
We can see that a strict Arab ascendancy was rather short lived, 622-750. Even so the Arabs wouldn=E2=80=99t disavow the Abbasid period. They did play an important role for much of it.
Turks were used as slaves and mercenaries during the Abbasid period. A Turkish slave (the term for which was =E2=80=98Mameluk=E2=80=99) was sent out from Baghdad to Egypt and succeeded in making himself the ruler there (in 868) and extending his dominion to Syria. In addition to the Mameluks, who continued to play an important role especially in Egypt and Syria, the Seljuk Turks invaded and in 1055 took Baghdad. In the period 1070-80 they took Syria and Palestine. It was the newly arrived Seljuk Turks and their victory at the Battle of Manzikert that caused Alexius Commenus of Constantinople to send a message to the traditional papal enemy and ask for aid, which arrived 20 years later in the form of the First Crusade.
With the end of the Golden Age (661) the Umayyid period began =E2=80=93 not a Golden Age to be sure, but at least it was Arab. During the Abbasid period, Islam may have advanced a bit but the Arabs did not. With the advent of the Seljuk Turks the same sort of thing could be said. C. W. Previte-Orton in The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History, page 244 writes "The Seljuk Turks and their like entered into the heritage of the past as patrons if not as full participants. It was the appalling devastation perpetrated by the Mongol conquerors in the thirteenth century that inflicted on the Moslem East a ruin from which it never recovered."
"What the Seljuks brought to the new empire," Previte-Orton writes on page 279, "was political capacity, fighting spirit and fanatical aggression. Their zeal to spread the faith and to conquer the infidel more than equaled that of the earlier converts." But their ascendancy was short-lived as well. Malik Shah (1072-91) was the last great Seljuk to rule a united empire.
Read about the Mongols in The Devil=E2=80=99s Horsemen, The Mongol Invasion of Europe by James Chambers, 1979. Representing the Seljuk=E2=80=99s Muhammad II was the ruler of Khwarizm [in present day Iran] in 1200. He was irresolute and unimaginative. He indulged his army by attacking his neighbors. When the Mongols attacked Kara Khitai [in present day Kazakhstan], Muhammad II saw his opportunity and took an easy victory over Transoxiana [in present day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan]. Thus, without ever testing his army very much, he became the richest ruler in the area, and on paper [an anachronistic image] the most powerful.
It was in about 1216 that an event occurred, roughly equivalent to the one that began World War I, that precipitated war between the Seljuk Muhammad II and the Mongols. A Seljuk governor confiscated the gold from a Mongol caravan and executed the Mongols, including a Mongol ambassador as spies. When the Mongols sent an ambassador to complain, Mohammad II cut off the head of the ambassador, burned off the hair and beards of the ambassador=E2=80=99s escorts and then gave them the head of the ambassador to return to the Mongols.
Muhammad II had 400,000 men in Transoxiana, twice as many as the Mongols and undoubtedly believed he could insult them with impunity. Chambers writes on page 6, "Mobilizing for the last time what was the most effective army in the world, the Mongol khan turned it towards the west. For the rest of his life and the life of his successor it was never to be disbanded." It took several battles, but Chingis Khan defeated the Seljuks and conquered not only Transoxiana but Khwarizm. At the Battle of Kose Dagh (1243) the independence of the Seljuk Turks was lost forever.
Since we are not interested in the Mongol period, I=E2=80=99ll pass over it with Chambers=E2=80=99 concluding paragraph (page 168): "The campaigns of the Mongol armies were the last and the most destructive in the long line of nomad invasions from the steppes. In just over fifty years they conquered half the known world and it was only their adherence to tribal traditions and the rivalry of their princes that denied them the rest of it. Western Europe and Islam were not saved outside the walls of Cracow and on the field at Ain Jalut, they were saved before when the Mongol armies halted in their moment of triumph. If Ogedei and Mangku had not died when they did, the largest empire that the world had ever known would have been bounded in the west not by the Carpathians and the Euphrates, but by the Atlantic Ocean."
And so we arrive at last to the Ottomans. The Mongols lost their fighting effectiveness and the Byzantines had fallen into decay; so the Ottomans could be said to have entered a vacuum. Following the Seljuk defeat in 1243, Osman I ("Ottoman" was a European corruption of "Osman") emerged as prince (amir) of the border principality of Bithynia in Northwestern Anatolia. Bernard Lewis describes the Ottomans as rising as a Phoenix from the Seljuk ashes.
Osman=E2=80=99s successor Orhan (1324-60) and Murad I (1360-89) whittled away at the Byzantine territories, first in Western Anatolia and then in southeastern Europe. Bayezid I (1389-1402) extended Ottoman power to the East. It was Orhan who began the practice of using Christian military troops, forming an organization called the Janissaries. They can=E2=80=99t be called =E2=80=98mercenaries.=E2=80=99 The Ottomans would demand young boys who met their qualification from Christian areas under their control. They would then turn these young boys into fanatical Muslims who fought with great esprit de corps.
Palmer begins chapter two with the Ottoman attack on Vienna in July 1683. Sultan Mehmed made a close companion, Kara Mustafa, his Grand Vizier. Kara Mustafa had experience. Two years earlier he had outwitted the great Polish soldier, John Sobieski, "to secure the fortress of Kamenets Podolsky for the Turks and their Tatar vassals. Kara Mustafa had a reputation for cruelty and had a fanatical hatred of Christians. "He retained a row of severed heads to commemorate his seizure of Hainburg, a fortified village some twenty miles down the Danube; and on 16 July his troops slaughtered four thousand villages in outlying Perchtoldsdorf." During the first week of the siege he ordered the systematic killing of prisoners, exhibiting their heads to demoralize the Austrian troops manning the defenses.
By August Kara Mustafa gave up hope of starving Vienna into submission and ordered an all out attack on its southern defenses, but by this time his old enemy, John Sobieski, had reached the northern bank of the Danube with his troops. Also, Sobieski had contacted Charles the Duke of Lorraine who was bringing a relief army of 80,000 German Troops. By October the Ottoman army had been defeated. Kara Mustafa did his best to blame his troops, but "On the last Saturday in December he was at his midday prayers when two senior Court dignitaries reached his . . . citadel" much as the individuals in pork pie hats reached the hero in Kafka=E2=80=99s The Trial. "Kara Mustafa completed his prayers, took off his turban and mantle of state, and allowed the executioner to throttle him speedily."
The Ottomans interest in invading their neighbors didn=E2=80=99t end in 1643. In 1697 they were at it again. General Sultan Mustafa met with some success against Emperor Leopolds troops obtaining for him a foothold north of the Danube, but in the late summer of 1697 he overstepped himself and advanced toward the =E2=80=98rich Hungarian granary of the Backsa [present day Serbia]. It was while the Ottoman army was crossing the Tiza, late in the evening of September 11th that the Austrians struck. Under the leadership of Prince Eugene of Savoy they cut the Ottoman forces in two and killed as many as 30,000 of their troops.
The defeat of the Muslim Army at the hands of Europeans made September 11th a black day in Muslim history. Whether Osama bin Laden was aware of that, I don=E2=80=99t know.
The Europeans at that point, had they been as blood-thirsty as Kara Mustafa, could have applied the delenda est solution to the Ottomans, but they were not. They merely wanted to be left alone so they could continue their European wars. England and the Netherlands sought to arbitrate a peace treaty so that the Habsburgs could concentrate on the struggle against Louis XIV=E2=80=99s France. "There was as yet no Eastern Question to perplex Western statesmen, only a tiresome and distracting Eastern Sideshow"; so writes Palmer. Negotiations ended in January 1699 with a peace settlement.
HTML VERSION:
--- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu -------- Original Message -----From: Scribe1865-AT-aol.comSent: Sunday, July 21, 2002 3:51 AMSubject: Re: standard diatribesIn a message dated 7-20-2002 8:52:24 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Villanova-AT-btopenworld.com writes:
yes, but Islamic progress ended some time ago. ie before the Enlightenment.
Why do civilisations decline, fall and rise? At one point Islam was a
world-conquering religion, with fanatical warriors (Ghazis) who fought for
loot. Then the Empire regulated warfare, and the army declined, ie became
less fanatical.
Yes, what is the Golden Age that the Islamist Arabs wanting to return to? What is the Ottoman Empire's grandeur that Bin Laden was trying to restore? To understand how delusionary it is, you have to know the time period. Here are some notes on the subject. -Eric / NYC
_________________
The Ottomans were around for about 600 years before Turkey became a Republic. It was the Ottomans who couldn=E2=80=99t keep up with European technology and military advances. Furthermore they were very much in decline as an empire and so unable to resist the European colonizers. The Turks are not a serious problem for us today. Instead we are concerned with Arab Fundamentalists who want to return to a Golden Age, but when was that Golden Age? And what happened to them during the Ottoman Empire?
It is an oversimplification to say that the Middle East was colonized by the French and English because it was colonizable, but at the same time it should not be forgotten that in the history of the human race, power vacuums are eventually filled by someone. Perhaps that is like saying =E2=80=98the keys were in the car. Someone was going to steal it so why not me?" But that has been realpolitik. Perhaps the current superpower has a more benign way of filling the power vacuums, seeking to get everyone to behave and be a decent trading partner. Our history is not so long that we can be sure.
Mohammad began his career in 622 and died in 632. He started the Arab expansion and it continued under the Caliphs that succeeded him. During the period 633-37, Syria and Iraq were conquered and during the period 639-42 Egypt was.
The Arab Golden age began with Mohammed in 622. He died in 632 and was succeeded by the first Righteous Caliph, Abu Bakr (632-634). The second Righteous Caliph was Omar (634-644). The third was Othman (644-655), and the last was Ali (655-661). After these four Righteous Caliphs, things began to degenerate a bit. Muawiya I (660-80) reverted to the methods used by pre-Islamic patriarchal chiefs, and after him it didn=E2=80=99t get any better. So the Golden Age of Islam referred to so often lasted a mere 39 years.
"The Umayyad period (661-750), which followed the Golden Age, can be generally described as the Mediterranean epoch of the caliphate, the period of the second great expansion of the dar al-islam." [from Grunebaum=E2=80=99s Classical Islam, A History, 600-1258]. In a real sense the Arab ascendancy ended with the fall of the Umayyad=E2=80=99s.
The next period was the Abbasid [the period began with the fall of the Umayyad but ended in stages: Spain in 756, Morocco in 788, Tunisia in 800, and Egypt in 868] and many consider it to be a victory of the Persians over the Arabs but there were Arab elements in the Abbasid. What held the empire together was no longer the Arabs in a leading position but Islam. Bernard Lewis refers to the Umayyad period as "The Arab Kingdom," and the Abbasid as "The Islamic Empire." There was a gradual lessening of Arab influence during the Abbasid period. Lewis in his The Arabs in History writes on page 84, "In the Army, the Arab militia was no longer important and the pensions paid to the Arabs were gradually discontinued except for regular serving soldiers. . . ."
We can see that a strict Arab ascendancy was rather short lived, 622-750. Even so the Arabs wouldn=E2=80=99t disavow the Abbasid period. They did play an important role for much of it.
Turks were used as slaves and mercenaries during the Abbasid period. A Turkish slave (the term for which was =E2=80=98Mameluk=E2=80=99) was sent out from Baghdad to Egypt and succeeded in making himself the ruler there (in 868) and extending his dominion to Syria. In addition to the Mameluks, who continued to play an important role especially in Egypt and Syria, the Seljuk Turks invaded and in 1055 took Baghdad. In the period 1070-80 they took Syria and Palestine. It was the newly arrived Seljuk Turks and their victory at the Battle of Manzikert that caused Alexius Commenus of Constantinople to send a message to the traditional papal enemy and ask for aid, which arrived 20 years later in the form of the First Crusade.
With the end of the Golden Age (661) the Umayyid period began =E2=80=93 not a Golden Age to be sure, but at least it was Arab. During the Abbasid period, Islam may have advanced a bit but the Arabs did not. With the advent of the Seljuk Turks the same sort of thing could be said. C. W. Previte-Orton in The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History, page 244 writes "The Seljuk Turks and their like entered into the heritage of the past as patrons if not as full participants. It was the appalling devastation perpetrated by the Mongol conquerors in the thirteenth century that inflicted on the Moslem East a ruin from which it never recovered."
"What the Seljuks brought to the new empire," Previte-Orton writes on page 279, "was political capacity, fighting spirit and fanatical aggression. Their zeal to spread the faith and to conquer the infidel more than equaled that of the earlier converts." But their ascendancy was short-lived as well. Malik Shah (1072-91) was the last great Seljuk to rule a united empire.
Read about the Mongols in The Devil=E2=80=99s Horsemen, The Mongol Invasion of Europe by James Chambers, 1979. Representing the Seljuk=E2=80=99s Muhammad II was the ruler of Khwarizm [in present day Iran] in 1200. He was irresolute and unimaginative. He indulged his army by attacking his neighbors. When the Mongols attacked Kara Khitai [in present day Kazakhstan], Muhammad II saw his opportunity and took an easy victory over Transoxiana [in present day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan]. Thus, without ever testing his army very much, he became the richest ruler in the area, and on paper [an anachronistic image] the most powerful.
It was in about 1216 that an event occurred, roughly equivalent to the one that began World War I, that precipitated war between the Seljuk Muhammad II and the Mongols. A Seljuk governor confiscated the gold from a Mongol caravan and executed the Mongols, including a Mongol ambassador as spies. When the Mongols sent an ambassador to complain, Mohammad II cut off the head of the ambassador, burned off the hair and beards of the ambassador=E2=80=99s escorts and then gave them the head of the ambassador to return to the Mongols.
Muhammad II had 400,000 men in Transoxiana, twice as many as the Mongols and undoubtedly believed he could insult them with impunity. Chambers writes on page 6, "Mobilizing for the last time what was the most effective army in the world, the Mongol khan turned it towards the west. For the rest of his life and the life of his successor it was never to be disbanded." It took several battles, but Chingis Khan defeated the Seljuks and conquered not only Transoxiana but Khwarizm. At the Battle of Kose Dagh (1243) the independence of the Seljuk Turks was lost forever.
Since we are not interested in the Mongol period, I=E2=80=99ll pass over it with Chambers=E2=80=99 concluding paragraph (page 168): "The campaigns of the Mongol armies were the last and the most destructive in the long line of nomad invasions from the steppes. In just over fifty years they conquered half the known world and it was only their adherence to tribal traditions and the rivalry of their princes that denied them the rest of it. Western Europe and Islam were not saved outside the walls of Cracow and on the field at Ain Jalut, they were saved before when the Mongol armies halted in their moment of triumph. If Ogedei and Mangku had not died when they did, the largest empire that the world had ever known would have been bounded in the west not by the Carpathians and the Euphrates, but by the Atlantic Ocean."
And so we arrive at last to the Ottomans. The Mongols lost their fighting effectiveness and the Byzantines had fallen into decay; so the Ottomans could be said to have entered a vacuum. Following the Seljuk defeat in 1243, Osman I ("Ottoman" was a European corruption of "Osman") emerged as prince (amir) of the border principality of Bithynia in Northwestern Anatolia. Bernard Lewis describes the Ottomans as rising as a Phoenix from the Seljuk ashes.
Osman=E2=80=99s successor Orhan (1324-60) and Murad I (1360-89) whittled away at the Byzantine territories, first in Western Anatolia and then in southeastern Europe. Bayezid I (1389-1402) extended Ottoman power to the East. It was Orhan who began the practice of using Christian military troops, forming an organization called the Janissaries. They can=E2=80=99t be called =E2=80=98mercenaries.=E2=80=99 The Ottomans would demand young boys who met their qualification from Christian areas under their control. They would then turn these young boys into fanatical Muslims who fought with great esprit de corps.
Palmer begins chapter two with the Ottoman attack on Vienna in July 1683. Sultan Mehmed made a close companion, Kara Mustafa, his Grand Vizier. Kara Mustafa had experience. Two years earlier he had outwitted the great Polish soldier, John Sobieski, "to secure the fortress of Kamenets Podolsky for the Turks and their Tatar vassals. Kara Mustafa had a reputation for cruelty and had a fanatical hatred of Christians. "He retained a row of severed heads to commemorate his seizure of Hainburg, a fortified village some twenty miles down the Danube; and on 16 July his troops slaughtered four thousand villages in outlying Perchtoldsdorf." During the first week of the siege he ordered the systematic killing of prisoners, exhibiting their heads to demoralize the Austrian troops manning the defenses.
By August Kara Mustafa gave up hope of starving Vienna into submission and ordered an all out attack on its southern defenses, but by this time his old enemy, John Sobieski, had reached the northern bank of the Danube with his troops. Also, Sobieski had contacted Charles the Duke of Lorraine who was bringing a relief army of 80,000 German Troops. By October the Ottoman army had been defeated. Kara Mustafa did his best to blame his troops, but "On the last Saturday in December he was at his midday prayers when two senior Court dignitaries reached his . . . citadel" much as the individuals in pork pie hats reached the hero in Kafka=E2=80=99s The Trial. "Kara Mustafa completed his prayers, took off his turban and mantle of state, and allowed the executioner to throttle him speedily."
The Ottomans interest in invading their neighbors didn=E2=80=99t end in 1643. In 1697 they were at it again. General Sultan Mustafa met with some success against Emperor Leopolds troops obtaining for him a foothold north of the Danube, but in the late summer of 1697 he overstepped himself and advanced toward the =E2=80=98rich Hungarian granary of the Backsa [present day Serbia]. It was while the Ottoman army was crossing the Tiza, late in the evening of September 11th that the Austrians struck. Under the leadership of Prince Eugene of Savoy they cut the Ottoman forces in two and killed as many as 30,000 of their troops.
The defeat of the Muslim Army at the hands of Europeans made September 11th a black day in Muslim history. Whether Osama bin Laden was aware of that, I don=E2=80=99t know.
The Europeans at that point, had they been as blood-thirsty as Kara Mustafa, could have applied the delenda est solution to the Ottomans, but they were not. They merely wanted to be left alone so they could continue their European wars. England and the Netherlands sought to arbitrate a peace treaty so that the Habsburgs could concentrate on the struggle against Louis XIV=E2=80=99s France. "There was as yet no Eastern Question to perplex Western statesmen, only a tiresome and distracting Eastern Sideshow"; so writes Palmer. Negotiations ended in January 1699 with a peace settlement.